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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary
The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter
A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons
Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature
Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen
The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism
A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel
From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution
Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy
Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper
A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament
Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature
Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays
Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life
The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church
Stewart Clem has this to say about The Tree of Life: Malick’s film “looks unflinchingly at life’s greatest mysteries – love, loss, alienation, and suffering – without a hint of cynicism. It’s a feat that’s rarely even attempted.” It “not only attempts to be beautiful, but invites and urges the viewer to think about beauty itself. We only need to remember Gore Vidal’s remark that ‘Santayana was the last aesthetician to describe beauty without self-consciousness; and that was in 1896′ to comprehend the audacity of such a project.”
Clem’s reflections are available here: http://www.transpositions.co.uk/2011/07/natures-grace-encountering-the-tree-of-life/
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 3:58 am
Josh Gibbs demurs on my endorsement of Tree of Life:
“I found much to like in The Tree of Life, but a few things stick in my craw. First and foremost the fact that Zbigniew Preisner’s “Lacrimosa” plays over images of the cosmos beginning. What is a song from a requiem doing when the outpouring of Triune love generates all of creation? Are creation and the Fall the same event? The comfort which Malick’s God seems to offer the O’Briens is that suffering and loss are woven into the blessed creation week, although we’re left to wonder, given that the creation is an outpouring of the Almighty, if suffering and loss are inherent within God. The suffering of the O’Briens might then be seen as a reunion with the uncreated suffering of God. The suffering of Christ is not necessary for consolation, merely a recognition that they’re at home within an eternally suffering universe- accurately mirroring the whole creation.
“While the film has a few nods to Job, the response of God in The Tree of Life is firmly planted in God’s first speech to Job. Nothing of God’s second speech makes it into the film. However, in the book of Job, neither God nor Job seem satisfied to set the consolation of the suffering solely upon the sublime mystery of creation. God presses on to describe His power over death and Satan, to show that they are the playthings of His angels.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, July 22, 2011 at 4:17 am
Critics say that Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is incomprehensible in its juxtaposition of the Big-Bang and primeval myth with a 1950s/60s family drama.
The O’Brien family experiences a renching loss, despite their confidence that those who live by grace (= self-sacrifice) are safe. In the face of loss, the most natural thing in the world is to raise the question of the universe: What’s this all about? What do we mean to Him? What’s the use of living in grace, if we all die anyway, the best earlier than others?
The film begins with a question from the book of Job, and the whole film is a meditation on the Lord’s words, “Where were you . . . ?”
The incomprehension is incomprehensible.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 3:15 pm
Francesca Murphy notes the difference between stage and screen acting (God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited
“Our bodies are the locus of our unity or singularity; You and I are whole or one because each of us is a certain physical space. And so, the stage actor uses her body to make her character a unity, to as to project an integrated ‘stage image’ throughout a play. On the other hand, the projected image of the screen actor is unified by a cutting process into which he does not enter, as an actor: whereas the theatre actor makes herself a unified image, the screen actor is made one. Whereas the ‘image’ the theatre actor ‘finally finds and fixes in himself and in the performance, he never separates from himself as from a living, feeling, and speaking person,’ the ‘edited image’ which comes out of movie acting ‘has been subjected to a technical finishing process quite impossible of application to a living being.’”
(The embedded quotations are from V. I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting.)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, June 20, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Tarkovsky on long shots: “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, March 25, 2011 at 8:45 pm
What my sons do in their spare time:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8JL7073_gk
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, May 28, 2010 at 7:59 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoE9Zm7NtWo
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, April 12, 2010 at 7:54 pm
On second viewing, the Pixar movie Up, appealing enough in its first viewing, definitely got better. The things that annoyed me, didn’t; what I thought were flaws, weren’t.
Such as: The fast-paced first ten minutes were my favorite part of the movie the first time around; probably still. But on first viewing, I found myself disappointed that I didn’t get to spend more time with Ellie. An energetic pushy tomboy, she was far more appealing than the “small mailman” that accompanies Carl on his old-age adventures. But within the first segment, she had met Carl, married him, suffered a miscarriage, grew old, and died. I had only started to get to know her. I felt cheated.
Now I see that’s what the filmmakers wanted. Without that emotional opening sequence, we’d have a hard time sympathizing with Carl’s nostalgia and disappointment. Given the opening ten minutes, we don’t just see Carl sighing over the unfinished adventure scrapbook; we sigh right along with him. We miss Ellie as much as Carl does. The movie makes the viewer feel nostalgic, until we realize that we, like Carl, need to shed the Bunyanesque burden of the past (the house that Carl comically pulls around by the garden hose) and get on with the next thing.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 25, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Carroll again: He explains that much recent film criticism takes its cues from the effort to maximize aesthetic satisfaction. This is evident in the respect given to “transgressive” films that overturn “what are called the codes of Hollywood filmmaking”: “Within the context of recent film criticism, it is appropriate to regard disturbances of continuity editing, disorienting narrative ellipses, or disruptions of eyeline matches as subversions of a dominant and ideologically suspect form of filmmaking.”
Once incoherence is valorized, it becomes easy to project it to earlier films. Hence the popularity of the B-movies of Ed Wood: “Plan 9 from Outer Space is a cheap, slapdash attempt to make a feature film for very little, and in cutting corners to save money it violates – in outlandish ways – many of the decorums of Hollywood filmmaking that later avant-gardists also seek to affront. So insofar as the work of contemporary avant-gardists is aesthetically valued for its transgressiveness, why not appreciate Plan 9 from Outer Space under an analogous interpretation? Call it ‘unintentional modernism,’ but it is modernism nonetheless and appreciable as such.” It is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to view Wood’s films as transgressive; therefore, they are transgressive.
Without an appeal to intention, this movement is inevitable, because intention seems to be the only thing that distinguishes a mistake from a transgression.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, September 26, 2009 at 8:26 am
In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but inherent in it.
The actor, he notes acts in “many separate performances” rather than in a single connected period of time, and not before an audience but in front of a mechanical device. This separation of audience and actor has a number of consequences for both.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 11:44 am
Evan Almighty is amusing in spots, but often cheesy, preachy, and predictable. But it does have one of the best put-downs of liberal theology I’ve seen anywhere. On God’s instructions, Evan Baxter has built a gigantic ark in the empty lots near his new DC-area home, endured the ridicule of the world and the skepticism of his family. The day of the flood comes, and it rains for a few moments and then clears. Evan’s wife suggests that Evan may have misinterpreted the message: “Maybe he didn’t mean a real flood. Maybe he meant a flood of insight, or emotion, or illumination.
Evan responds: “If that’s true, I am going to be sooo pissed.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 2:49 am
And another thing: Who could believe that you could make a movie that is not just watchable but deeply engaging with basically two people, one of whom says nothing? What kind of artistic chutzpah does it take to try to wring drama out of a 2-hour monologue? What kind of genius does it take to succeed?
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 11:30 am
Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 Persona is brilliant cinematic philosophy. Elisabet, an actress, becomes confused during a performance and falls silent. Her psychiatrist gives this diagnosis: She got tired of playing roles, putting on masks, and knew that every word she spoke involved some sort of performance. So she stopped speaking. But the psychiatrist also discerns that her silence is also a performance, and urges her to play it for all its worth and then move on to another role.
Sister Alma, a young nurse, takes care of Elisabet at a seaside cottage. Sharing days with the utterly silent Elisabet, she finds herself chattering on and on, revealing her most shameful secrets. Elisabet says nothing. Alma becomes desperate for something, a single word, a minute of conversation. She has given herself, and received nothing in return, and begins to go crazy. (Can a gift be given?) Only when, during a violent argument, Alma threatens to throw boiling water on her does Elisabet speak. Fear forces her out from behind the mask.
Several points from this very rich film:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 6:17 am
Virtually the first English words you hear in the recent film Transsiberian come from a pastor leading a mission trip to minister to children in China. ”Ours is not a gray world,” he says. ”Under the bright light of truth,” he says, “it’s a world of clear contrasts: black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. There’s always a choice. With faith, the choice is an easy one.”
Listening with others, Roy (Woody Harrelson) smiles and nods.
As the credits roll, though, the opening words seem ironic.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Two fatherless boys – Will, a pious member of the Plymouth Brethren, and Lee, the school’s bully and bad boy – find stability and hope when they become blood brothers and make an amateur Rambo spin-off.
It’s a promising premise, but Son of Rambow doesn’t carry it off.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 9:44 am
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy truly deserves all the epithets hurled at it, and Christians are gearing up for the December release of the film version of The Golden Compass, the first book in the trilogy.
We needn’t worry. Hollywood is working its magic.
Chris Weitz, the on-again, off-again, back-on-again writer and director, explained how the film will treat the book’s anti-Christianity in an online interview back in 2004: “New Line is a company that makes films for economic returns. . . . They have expressed worry about the possibility of HDM’s perceived antireligiosity making it an unviable project financially . . . Needless to say, all my best efforts will be directed towards keeping HDM as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can. But there may be some modification of terms.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 9, 2007 at 8:06 am
In his splendid performance history of Shakespeare, David Bevington frequently comments on the “scenic literalism” of film and television. Commenting on a TV production of As You Like It, he laments that the production “tells us where we are in the story by putting entire landscapes or interiors in front of our eyes even before the characters have said a word. We ‘read’ the scene first in terms of its visual setting. In this case, the attempt is misguided because it takes away the magic of an imagined landscape where all sorts of things can and do happen that would be absurd in an actual rural location.” Even Laurence Olivier is “unable to rescue [Paul Czinner's 1936 film] from its saccharine premise that the play is a good old-fashioned love story set in a picturesque countryside.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Ellen Belton points out that in the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice, “Elizabeth and Darcy (Colin Firth) are hardly ever frames together until well into the second half of the film, and when they are shown in the same shot, the effect is to emphasize the obstacles between them. In the private interview at Hunsford that precedes the first proposal scene, Elizabeth and Darcy rarely look directly at one another. In the one shot in which both their faces are seen, Elizabeth is seated on the left, Darcy on the right, each framed against a different window and each looking toward the camera. A fall cabinet/writing desk between the windows in the background dominates the center of the shot. In the proposal scene itself, Elizabeth and Darcy’s faces are never seen in the same frame until Elizabeth rises to hasten Darcy’s departure.” Yet, from the beginning the film anticipates their eventual union by a progression from “sidelong glances to direct contemplation to mutual admiration.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, August 10, 2007 at 5:10 pm
In his history of American movies (thanks again Ken Myers), David Thomson notes that “there was in the ordinary lifestile of the first moguls a steady habit of gambling.” David Selznick, he says, “lost a couple of million dollars in two years.”
No wonder: Their whole industry is a form of gambling: “Making a movie is not a wise, judicious use of money. . . . But to make a movie puts on in line, notionally, for a very big hit. Increasingly in the history of movis . . . the ethos of the stand-out super-hit has taken over from a policy of steady business. That in itself is a mark of how unbusinesslike the business is.”
To illustrate, he describes the process of funding for The Ten Commandments:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, December 24, 2006 at 8:45 am
Last year, we got the first season of Lost on DVD and were instantly hooked. These guys sure know how to hold an audience. But for me the hold is weakening as we begin watching the second seson, as it becomes increasingly clear that all these people escaped from a Sidney psyche ward.
Flight 815 was a ship of fools.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 6:11 am
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